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Mr. Hubbard said he was particularly impressed by how “well-documented” Professor Alexander’s book is. But to some of the book’s detractors, including those deeply sympathetic to her goal of ending mass incarceration, its scholarship falls short.

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Whatever Professor Alexander’s account of the origins of mass incarceration, her overall depiction of its human costs is resonating even with people who disagree with her politics.

Incarceration in the United States - Wikipedia

Mr. McCarthy is not alone. During the past two years Professor Alexander has been provoking such moments across the country — and across the political spectrum — with her book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” which has become a surprise best seller since its paperback version came out in January. Sales have totaled some 175,000 copies after an initial hardcover printing of a mere 3,000, according to the publisher, the New Press.

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Another important component of punishment should be work. It is madness that prisoners spend years in state-sponsored idleness punctuated by sporadic brutality. It is time to repeal Depression-era protectionist laws that ban prison-made goods from interstate commerce and require payment of prevailing-wage rates to prisoners (making prison industries unprofitable). All able-bodied prisoners should have to complete their educations and work, learning good work habits as well as marketable skills. One could even experiment with sending able-bodied prisoners without serious violent tendencies to enlist in the military, as used to be routine (think of the movie The Dirty Dozen). Some of prisoners’ wages could go to support their families, cover some costs of incarceration, and make restitution to their victims.

National Book Foundation: Who did you write this book for

The cornerstone of a conservative criminal-justice agenda should be strengthening families. More than half of America’s inmates have minor children, more than 1.7 million in all; most of these inmates were living with minor children right before their arrest or incarceration. Inmates should meet with their families often. They should be incarcerated as close to home as possible, not deliberately sent to the other end of the state. Visitation rules and hours need to be eased, and extortionate collect-call telephone rates should come down to actual cost.

Watch: Incarceration Nation | HuffPost

So the stock liberal charges against “mass incarceration” simply don’t hold water. There is no racist conspiracy, nor are we locking everyone up and throwing away the key. Most prisoners are guilty of violent or property crimes that no orderly society can excuse. Even those convicted of drug crimes have often been implicated in violence, as well as promoting addiction that destroys neighborhoods and lives.

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Like President Obama, Alexander blames mass incarceration on the racially tinged War on Drugs. “In less than thirty years, the U.S. penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase.” And the War on Drugs was supposedly driven by coded racial appeals, in which elite whites galvanized poor whites to vote Republican by scapegoating black drug addicts. The fault, she insists, does not lie with criminals or violence. “Violent crime is not responsible for the prison boom. . . . The uncomfortable reality is that convictions for drug offenses — not violent crime — are the single most important cause of the prison boom in the United States,” and minorities are disproportionately convicted of drug crimes.

Where Do We Go from Here? Mass Incarceration and …

Two days later, Obama became the first sitting president to visit a prison. Speaking immediately after his visit, the president blamed mandatory drug sentencing as a “primary driver of this mass-incarceration phenomenon.” To underscore that point, he met with half a dozen inmates at the prison, all of whom had been convicted of nonviolent drug offenses. Three days earlier, he had commuted the federal prison terms of 46 nonviolent drug offenders, most of whom had been sentenced to at least 20 years’ imprisonment.